THE IAN CHARLESON AWARDS

Ambassadors of the imaginationThis page was originally created by, and is the property of, dramaddict@aol.com.
When it disappeared from the Internet, I had it saved, and so I am posting it here, but I take no credit for the work involved in creating it. Likewise, many of the links and photographs don't work. Nor, to my knowledge, does dramaddict's e-mail, whom I did try to contact before using the page.-Ailis, RTWM, 4 February 00.

1997

DOMINIC WEST

1998

CLAUDIE BLAKLEY

JOHN PETER announces the fourthSunday Times-Royal National Theatre Ian Charleson Awards for young actors

THE SUNDAY TIMES, January 30, 1994

The fourth annual Sunday Times-Royal National Theatre Awards will be presented at a lunch at the Royal National Theatre on Tuesday, March 8. The award is for the best performances in classical roles for actors and actresses under 30 in Britain. Classical roles here mean roles in plays written up until 1904, the year Chekhov died. The first prize is #5,000; the second prize #1,500; the third prize #500. The guest of honour presenting the prizes will be Sir Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and former director of the National Theatre. My fellow judges this year are Jane Lapotaire, currently appearing in the great RSC production of Ghosts; Serena Hill, casting director of the Royal National Theatre; and Nicholas Wright, playwright and director, and one of the National's associate directors. The award commemorates Ian Charleson, who died of Aids, aged 40, just four years ago while playing Hamlet in Richard Eyre's production at the Olivier. No one who saw Charleson's performance is likely to forget it. He was a bright, shining Prince facing an inevitable darkness. The dynamic, elegant, precise delivery, a frisky but melancholy humour laced with sardonic venom, the poised, virile, athletic command of the vast stage, were hiding a body holding on to its last ounces of strength with a precarious, but determined, ferocity. Actors who worked with him say he was so weak that the slightest push might have toppled him over; but to the unknowing spectator none of that was apparent. I knew that Charleson had been ill but had no inkling of the nature of his illness; yet I sensed, as I believe did most people in that packed house, that when he spoke of special providence in the fall of a sparrow, of the inevitable approach of that fell sargeant death, he spoke as someone who saw and understood the imminent end. The point about Charleson was that he reached greatness too late. Ian McKellen said about him that he played Hamlet like someone who had rehearsed the role all his life; and in his last weeks Charleson realised that his future, if he should have one, ought to lie with the great Shakespearian roles. Looking back, Charleson's short life seems to have been an unselfconscious preparation for such greatness; and yet, after his huge success in Chariots of Fire, he waited, with strong but decreasing hope, for the call of Hollywood and the Big Break. It never came. That was Hollywood's loss. The Ian Charleson Award honours the actor whose name it bears. But it also warns young actors to be firm with themselves and guard their priorities. Classical acting is the bedrock of the theatre. The classical actor lives in two worlds simultaniously: the world of the past in which his play is set, and the world of the present for which he is playing. He is an ambassador of the mind and the imaginatiion, charged with representing the ideas of the past to the country called the present, and he has to take care that we in the present understand his mission. He has to be able to speak a language of both. This year's shortlist for the Ian Charleson Award, like the three previous shorlists, has been drawn up with an eye to promise, achievement and technique. In our view, clarity and precision of speech are the indespensable foundation of all acting. An actor who does not speak well is like an electric light which blinks: you know that there is something to see, but you cannot make it out. The other main factor, the psychological understanding of the role, is inextricably bound up with clarity of speech: they are both tributaries of an art fed by the same source. Our shortlisted actors have been chosen because they show that they understand this: we all wish them a strenuous, but successful, future.Winners of Sunday Times-Royal National Theatre Ian Charleson Award

For full article on 1997 nominees see Sunday Times Online CULTURE for April 26, 1998

Trevor Nunn, director of the National Theatre . . .opened the winners' lunch by warning that traditional verse-speaking was facing a crisis. "As schools drop Shakespeare from the classroom and can no longer afford to take children to the theatre, we may enter the next millennium with classical theatre regarded as an endangered species," he warned. Nunn revealed he will be doing his bit to stem this decline. "Now seems to be a good moment to declare that Sir Peter Hall, Adrian Noble, director John Barton and myself, prompted by David Suchet, are pledged to organise an annual verse and text workshop open to all-comers. If we don't do something, then the classical tradition that inspired us all will dwindle and die." This plan was welcomed loudly by guests such as Janet Suzman, Michael Gambon, Felicity Kendal, Zoe Wanamaker, Ian McKellen and special guest Paul Scofield, who may now find themselves being asked to coach budding Oliviers on the South Bank.